Some questions about transfering certain data from one 'puter to another...

Ok, Is there anyway that I can access the SAME ical & mac mail data from 2 networked computers?

Basically I am hiring someone to work on my home office with me. I want to be able to have her see the same calendar I am looking at and have access to our biz email account (all mail boxes) and all that good stuff. I am aware of how to transfer data...it just would be nice that when I put things on my computer ical, that she sees it on hers. How do I make our computer share the same brain?

Do I set it up as a mirror? What is the best way for our screens/data/programs to be identical, but we can both work on the computer at the same time (not in the same program of course).

I am guessing, just using a network and allowing her access to certain things/ HELP??!!!

What you are looking for is a groupware solution and I fear the single user solutions built into Mac OS X offer not quite the features you're looking for.

As long as you both are using different computers the system itself doesn't offer much to help you with this.

For your biz email the solution could be to give her the same email account that you do use, i.e. she uses the same account with the same acces to your ISPs email. You just need to care that neither email client deletes mail from the server instantly after receiving it, which can be achieved via proper settings in the mail client. So basically you both are sharing the same mailbox receiving the same incoming e-mail. However, you won't see her outbound e-mail traffic and she won't see yours.

The use of a common iCal data base is not possible in its current incarnation. You could share iCalendars via .MAC or a Mac OS X Server, or your local websharing ability in Mac OS X with a few modest modifications, but a suchwise shared calendar could be just viewed, not edited by her as well. Nor could you update hers.

There are groupware solutions out there, but I guess these are a bit oversized for your purpose. Maybe you want to look into such solutions further? There is a lot of commercial software that does this, and as well some open source software.

If all you want her to be able to do is to look at (not alter) the calendar, then you just need to "publish" the calander in question from one computer to a server, then you subscribe to that calender from the other computer and set the checking interval to something small (say 15 minutes).

.Mac provides this, but you can also setup your own WebDav server... relatively easy... or there are other creative ways of doing this by tweaking some settings in apache... but it sounds like you might have .Mac.

As to the mail part... once again this is easy if you have .Mac. Since it uses IMAP you just setup the email account like you would normally, and make sure that both computers are set to check the mailbox fairly often (5 minutes should do). Because .Mac is based on IMAP, both computers will see the same mail that is stored on the server. When one deletes/moves a message, the other will see that after the next check for mail (5 minutes thing).

If you don't have .Mac, then you just need to make sure that your email account is an IMAP (not POP3) account, and you are set... same process. You can even create your own local IMAP server if you are stuck on POP, but that requires just a little savvy (time for a consultant probably... I have done this a few times for about $200).

The more I use .Mac the more I become dependent on it. I just wish I could edit calendars online from any computer and I would be set (that would make it PC friendly for a work project I want to start).

The email part does work easy via comptuers. My iMac and iBook work great using the email and calendar.

You could set up both computers to sync the calendar on each computer to the same .Mac account (super easy) and every few minutes they will update. It is just like the email setup, you see the updates and corrections everytime it sync's. My iBook and iMac both sync this way and it works great. Heck, I even have it sync my PocketPc and my iPod (quickly making my PocketPC become usueless). I am am sync'd kinda guy and all thanks to .Mac.

I would purchase a .Mac account for your business and you are set. The easiest $100/year you will ever spend.

I did something like what Karl said for a printing company i helped out. Since not everybody had a computer, i set people up for checking their individual mail with my hosts (lunarpages.com) web-mail. For their main account which about five people check, they all just check it with webmail

For the account for people to send their projects, i did what Karl said with IMAP. This made it easier than web-mail because it automatically started download the attachment.

If you just want to share an address books you can look into LDAP or something similar.

If you really want a powerful group-ware suite, try out Centrinity FirstCLass. I do not know how much it is but it is unbelievably powerful. (IMHO)